The Last Hunger Season illuminates the profound challenges Africa smallholder farmers face and the potential they can unlock to help achieve global food security.

David embraces the promise of food security

Amua group learning new planting methods.

Four African farmers unite in action against their persistent hunger to conquer the Wanjala the annual hunger season—once and for all. Struggling with climate change, tired seeds, depleted soil, inadequate storage facilities, wretched roads, and no capital or credit, subsistence farmers typically harvest less than one-quarter the yields of farmers in the developed world per unit of land. Determinate to improve their lives, the farmers join an agriculture development project, One Acre Fund, that promises to help them grow their own way out of poverty by providing education, micro-loans and a bundle of essential services. The daily drama of the farmers’ lives unfolds against the backdrop of a looming global challenge. To feed a growing population world food production must nearly double by 2050. With most of the world already producing at maximum yield, the best hope we have to feed ourself is dramatically increasing production in the most under-performing areas. African smallholder farmers are essential to eradicating hunger and poverty worldwide.

Award-winning author and world hunger activist Roger Thurow and filmmakers Josh Courter and Giulia Longo spent a year with the farmers and their communities to intimately chronicle their efforts. The project illuminates the profound challenges these farmers and their families face, and follows them through the seasons to see whether, with a little bit of support, they might grow their own way out of poverty using their own hands and their own land.

The Last Hunger Season: A Year In An African Farm On The Brink Of Change

AT 4:00 AM, LEONIDA WANYAMA LIT A LANTERN IN HER house made of sticks and mud. She was up long before the sun to begin her farm work, as usual. But this would be no ordinary day, this second Friday of the new year. This was the day Leonida and a group of small- holder farmers in western Kenya would begin their exodus, as she said, “from misery to Canaan,” the land of milk and honey.

TEDx and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have teamed up for a very special TEDx project – TEDxChange.Roger Thurow talks about his Positive Disruption "Looking into the eyes of someone dying of hunger becomes a disease of the soul."